Data cleaning takes up a lot of time during a data science process; it’s not necessarily a bad thing and time spent on cleaning data is worthwhile in most cases; To that end, I was researching some framework that might help me make this process a little bit faster. As a part of my research, I found the Journal of statistical software paper written by Hadley Wickham which had a really good framework to “tidy” data — which is part of data cleaning process.
Author does a great job of defining tidy data:
And then applying it to 5 examples:
It also contains some sample R code; You can read the paper here: http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf